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English Too Easy for Hungarians

By

Gergo Racz

Aug 18, 2011 3:25 pm CET

Hungary’s government wants to dethrone English as the most common foreign language taught in Hungarian schools. The reason: it’s just too easy to learn.

“It is fortunate if the first foreign language learned is not English. The initial, very quick and spectacular successes of English learning may evoke the false image in students that learning any foreign language is that simple,” reads a draft bill obtained by news website Origo.hu that would amend Hungary’s education laws.

Instead, the ministry department in charge of education would prefer if students “chose languages with a fixed, structured grammatical system, the learning of which presents a balanced workload, such as neo-Latin languages.”